On ToTheMoon, New York shows up first of all as the place where rules for AI get written: it is where OpenAI is taken to court, bills to restrict model answers are introduced, and certain data centres are banned. The question the channel keeps returning to through its New York stories is how much control over data and answers is left to the user once courts and politicians decide.
The first big New York story is The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI. In episode 064, in 2025, the hosts went through the court order requiring OpenAI to retain logs of every request, including deleted ones, and noted that a company may be unable to keep its promise to delete data. Episode 071 came back to it after the GPT-5 launch: a New York court had demanded that conversations be preserved indefinitely, so privacy settings help but are not a safe. In episode 083 the city illustrated how retail chains employ remote cashiers from the Philippines and Indonesia.
The regulatory thread continued in 2026. Episode 102 mentioned a New York politician proposing to bar models from answering questions on medicine and psychology, episode 138 noted a ban on building certain data centres, and episode 141 used a statement by the city's new mayor as an example of a politically charged scenario in a discussion of where AI answers stop. The most personal moment is episode 147: Alexander had just flown in from New York, where AI billboards turn up roughly one in a hundred or two hundred, and called it the first trip on which AI had been genuinely precise about which places to visit.